Becky had thought she could be different, that she would never let herself cave in, but that was exactly what she was doing, crouching on the stoop and pulling her knees to her chest. Her body convulsed, arms, shoulders, neck heaving. This was it. She was losing it. Losing.
An explosion shattered Neil’s sleep. Gunshots. Sharp, metallic, irrevocable. He jerked upright. The shots were being fired next door, barely thirty feet away from his bed. Counting six shots, he listened for her voice, for screams, pleas, cries, but there was only silence. Six shots, then that gaping void. Throwing on some clothes, he crept out into the backyard. The moon was just past full, now waning, sinking into darkness. Parting the Virginia creeper, he glimpsed her through the links in the fence. She clutched herself with crossed arms like a lost soul.
He wouldn’t do it—he would not call the police or phone for an ambulance. He knew none of the neighbors would get involved. Rolling his head back, he stared at the scattered stars revolving in a dance too slow to see. Let her get away with it, he thought, shocking himself. Let her get away with murder. Going to the fence again, peering through the links at the moon-bleached woman, he called her name.
She walked numbly around the side of the house to his gate, which he unlocked for her. Shivering, she kept rubbing her skinny bare arms. The only thing he could think to do was put his arm around her and guide her through his door and into his kitchen, where she gazed blankly at the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling.
“Becky, do you want to tell me what happened?”
Turning to him, she took an unsteady step forward, then lost her balance. He caught her before she could fall. “He was too drunk to move,” she said. “I shot him in the back. Like a real coward! I just shot him in the back, and after the first shot, I couldn’t stop.”
He cradled her as she wept, stroked her soft dark hair, cut very short, exposing the fine bones of her face, her large and fearful eyes. He could feel her pulse, much faster than his own, like wings beating frantically—a small bird taking flight.
Becky awakened to insistent electronic beeps, the digital alarm. 4:04. Her hair was damp with perspiration. The sheets were clammy.
“Would you shut that fucking thing off?” Hank rolled over and covered his face with the pillow. He didn’t start work until 9:00.
Her pulse raced as she remembered her dream. She had been a bird—a barn swallow—and she had been flying. That feeling of freedom and weightlessness had been so incredible, but then the dream had shifted, and she had turned into a hawk with talons for ripping flesh. Swooping down on a rabbit, she had torn into the soft fur until blood laced her feathers. But the killing and the blood hadn’t seemed repulsive in her dream, just a thing of nature, a call she had to answer. Walking to the bus stop, she savored the dream, the sinewy power in her wings and talons. It was payday. She knew exactly what she had to do.
Neil was working overtime in the emergency room to cover for Alicia, whose breakdown had been even more serious than he had first thought—she had been hospitalized and would need to take a long leave of absence.
They always seemed to get their worst cases in August when the heat and the glare of the sun gave rise to the most sickening acts of violence. Like a factory line worker, he extracted bullets from flesh and disinfected wounds. Yesterday they brought in a homeless woman who had been raped and then stabbed twenty times. She had lost so much blood that she couldn’t be saved. Alicia was the one who used to work with rape victims—she had done it very well—but the homeless woman was so far gone, not even Alicia could have given her solace. It was getting to be too much, even for him. All week he had been having dreams that made him lurch awake in sweat- soaked sheets: nightmares of the young woman next door gunning down her boyfriend.
Yesterday a letter from Gina, his ex, had arrived. They divorced in 1981. She had been sick of the neighborhood and his lack of ambition. “Everyone else has moved on, but you’re not going anywhere,” she’d told him. “You’re stuck here like one of your plants.” She had gone to Seattle to ride the waves of the software boom and then the dot-com boom. Presently she worked freelance out of her ’20s bungalow on Bainbridge Island, her existence comfortably cushioned by investments and stock options. The one time he had visited her there, the thing that had struck him most was how white and affluent everyone was. He and Gina were still good friends. Since he was the only person on the planet who didn’t have e-mail, they wrote letters every month.
For the past few years, she had been trying to convince him to move. He was welcome to stay with her until he found a job and a place to live. Just down the street from her house was a folk club where he could play his flute. He had to admit that her offer was tempting. Gina would help him find a job in some pristine clinic where his patients would be programmers and engineers, where he would never have to look at another torn-up, bleeding homeless person. If he didn’t get out soon, he would end up like Alicia.
He arrived home from the hospital with a headache that made his garden shimmer like a hallucination. On the other side of the fence, something made of glass hit a hard surface and shattered. Then came muted grunting, the impact of a fist hitting something soft, and drawn-out weeping that didn’t even sound human. Neil ran to the fence to see the guy next door straddle the gutted motorbike and punch the ripped seat. He was shaking as hard as Neil was.
Everyone’s cracking up, he thought. There was no escape from it, no sanctuary from screaming and pain, even in his garden. Neil imagined that if someone saw his face, it would look like Alicia’s when she had lost it that day. A wave of dizziness forced him to sit down. He rubbed his temples, rehearsed what he would say to Gina when he called her that night: “As soon as I sell the house, I’m out of here.”
Something on the edge of the zucchini bed glinted in the sun. A Ziploc bag. Puzzled, he picked it up, then nearly dropped it. Inside was a gun. A note was tied to its handle, his name written in shaky ballpoint.
Neil,
You probably think I’m crazy for throwing this over your fence, but it’s a lot safer with you than with Hank. He didn’t have a license for this stupid thing, so either turn it in to the police or bury it. I already took the bullets out.
Under her signature, she had written,
On a mild September afternoon, Neil sat on the back porch and listened to the children next door squeal as they jumped into piles of raked leaves. A Hmong family had moved in after Hank left. The other day, a postcard from Becky arrived. She said she was waitressing in Madison and saving to go back to college. She got away, he kept thinking. She had to go and she went. But he had decided to stay. He had told Gina that he was too settled to pull up roots anymore. “I guess I’m going to grow old here, right in this neighborhood.”
The garden rustled and whispered to him like an old friend. Looking at his birch tree, he thought of roots sinking into the earth, then watched its golden leaves reach into the intense blue of the autumn sky. The colors sang inside him as he began to play his flute.
THE GUY
by Pete Hautman
Jane Day-Wellington said, “This thing is leaking.”
“What thing?”
“This drain thingie.” She pointed. “There’s water under the sink.”
Courtney Wellington fitted his Canterbury Park ball cap onto his head and shrugged. “So call the guy.”
“What guy?”
“The drain guy.”
Jane got down on her knees and looked carefully at the dripping pipe. “You can’t fix it?”
“Do I look like the drain guy?” He did not look like the drain guy. He looked like a genetically dilute, down- on-his-luck aristocrat in a baseball cap.
